“Little Ernie’s a hothead. He’d try and do it the day of the announcement. Eduardo might, too. I don’t think either of them is worried about the U.S. authorities, if that’s what you’re asking.” He stood, walked over to the Mr. Coffee, held up the pot. I shook my head. He poured some in his cup. “D’Onifrio won’t go down easily, either. He’ll be prepared for anything, probably armed to the teeth.”
“Are you saying the nephews might not be able to kill him?”
He walked back to the table, sat down. “Be tough. Even with all the firepower in their entourage, and they’re bringing fifteen bodyguards.”
“But they can’t bring guns into the country?”
“They have people here for that. By the time they get in cars to leave the airport, they’ll be fully armed.”
I finished my coffee. “Does Enrico speak English?”
“A little. The nephews are fluent.” He smiled. “Television.”
“Where do they hold their meetings?”
“Usually at Shore. Although one year when Enrico was ill, they used a meeting room at the Colony.” Raines must have sensed I was running out of questions. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re thinking. But I hope what I’ve told you makes you understand it’s a bad idea. Get away from these people. They’ve killed four of my men. They won’t hesitate to kill you.” He stood.
I did, too. “Thanks for meeting with me.” I held out my hand, we shook.
“Sorry to bother you at home.”
“This isn’t my house. It belonged to one of my operatives. They tortured him to death last week.”
Chapter 34
I had a ton of work waiting for me when I returned to the office. “It’s all this gallivanting around you’ve been doing,” Rosemary said, summing up the problem.
She was right. I’d been out of the office way too much. The clients had to be wondering. Worse, I didn’t see how the situation was going to get any better for the next couple of weeks.
I’d had talks with a young broker at Smith Barney, Saul Badgett, about joining the firm. He was a sharp young kid who’d be great to help out and “grow the business.” But I hated to bring him on with Fowler and the N.A.S.D. hanging over my head. It wouldn’t be fair to Saul to have him join, then go out of business.
So I chained myself to my desk and worked. At six, Rosemary stuck her head in to let me know she was leaving. “I’m impressed,” she said. “You got a good bit accomplished.”
I still had a pile in front of me. “Guilt,” I told her. “I don’t want the clients feeling I’m neglecting them.”
She smiled. “Well, I haven’t heard any talk about stringing you up by your thumbs yet.”
“Only because you’ve covered for me so beautifully.”
She blushed, made a face. “Oh, go on.”
“Just want you to know I appreciate all you’re doing.”
She beamed. “See you in the morning.” I heard her lock the front door as she left.
I went back to the stack, was almost to the bottom when the phone rang.
I picked up the receiver, hit the button. “Seattle on Stocks.”
“Matt. Tory. I wanted to call and let you know I’ve done all I can on this Merrill Lynch investigation. I haven’t found anything. Sorry.”
So was I. If she’d found something, anything, I could have gotten Nevitt off my back. “You said it was going to be tough.”
“I tried everything I know to try. Whoever’s guilty has hidden it really well.”
“The Nevitt connection. Anything there?”
“I’m afraid not. I cross-referenced him with everybody at Merrill Lynch. No matches.”
“Thanks for trying,” I said, discouraged.
She rang off.
I tried to go back to work. But after her phone call, my heart wasn’t in it. I turned off my computer, left for home. I stopped at Publix, picked up a salad. In my present mood, I needed something simple. No preparation. No cleanup. Back at the condo, I ate my salad right out of the plastic container, washed it down with wine in a plastic cup. Dinner over, I rinsed the plastic, put it in the recycling bin, and got out my Blackberry. I wanted to enter what Raines had told me while it was still fresh in my mind.
When everything was entered, I stared at it, tried to sort it out. My plan had been vague at best. Get information about D’Onifrio’s sloppiness to Enrico and crew, see if I could start a fight between them. What Raines had given me confirmed that was possible, not probable. I wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere near Enrico or the nephews.
I worried about it for more than two hours. Frustrated with myself, I got up, put on a pair of swim trunks and a tee shirt. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone for a midnight walk on the beach to sort things out. I left my shoes by a chair on the pool deck and walked to the Gulf’s edge. It was a warm night with a sky full of stars, just a touch of a breeze. I walked on the wet sand, letting the waves wash over my feet as they ran up on the beach. Usually, a walk at the water’s edge relaxed me. Tonight, my mind was too confused, conflicted to enjoy this simple pleasure.
“Well, well. It’s just you and me. How about that?”
William Wilder stood ten feet in front of me, a gun in his hand.
I froze.
He took a couple of steps forward. He was dressed in a fancy shirt and tie. Braces held up his trousers. His concession to being on the beach was no suit jacket. He was grinning wildly.
“What do you want?” I was scared, but I was also tired, and that made me irritable.
He laughed. “Oooh, getting brave are we? You won’t feel so brave when I tell you want I want.” He raised the gun and pointed it at my head. “I want to put a hole right between your eyes.” He pretended to pull the trigger. “Poof, you’re dead.” He put the gun down. “You’re lucky. Tonight is not about what I want, it’s about what Mr. D’Onifrio wants. He wants to see you.”
“Great, I’ll call him in the morning, go by the bank.” I started to turn to walk back to my condo.
“Not tomorrow. Now.”
I stopped, half turned around. “What if I don’t want to go now?”
He grinned. “He said I could pistol whip you, not so bad you couldn’t talk, but pretty bad.”
I didn’t doubt him. In fact, he was probably hoping I’d give him trouble so he could hurt me. I took a deep breath, blew out. “Where are we going? I don’t have any shoes on.”
“Poor baby, doesn’t have any shoes. You’re going to have to walk over broken glass, too.”
I followed Wilder to his car, thankful I was walking on sand, concrete, and asphalt. He drove us to D’Onifrio’s house, a huge, walled estate on the water south of town. A guard opened the gate at the end of the driveway. Wilder pulled up in front of the house, stopped, turned off the engine. “Ring the door bell. He’s waiting for you.” I got out and walked up to the door. The driveway was loose gravel that felt like broken glass. I reached the door, pressed the bell.
Ding dong, ding dong, ding ding ding dong, it echoed inside.
The door was opened by a young blond woman wearing a man’s white dress shirt and nothing else. I could tell there wasn’t anything else because she only had the very bottom button buttoned. Ann, the girl from the bank.
“Close your mouth and come on in,” she smiled at me. “He’s waiting on you, and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
I shut my mouth, remembered Tory’s description of this place as the Playboy mansion South.
“This way.” She led me down a long hall to a media room in the back of the house. A porno flick was playing on a projection TV system with a screen so large the assembled body parts looked life-size.
D’Onifrio was sitting on a leather sofa, watching. Ann tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, looked at her, then at me. “Sit.” He pointed at a chair next to the sofa.
I sat. Or rather, perched. Nervously.
He stared at me, his face tired, his hair disheveled. He was wearing a black satin ro
be. I don’t think he had anything else on. Not even his hearing aids. There was no whine. “Fish tells me his involvement with this woman is going well. Wilder tells me he thinks it’s going well. I want to know what you think.”
I swallowed. “I think she’s bought the idea that Fish is a multi-millionaire and she’s starting to put the moves on him. It’s actually going faster than I thought—”
“How fast?” he said, his face turning more intense.
“Pretty fast, I think.” I fumbled for words.
He scowled. His eyes looked away from me, back to the screen, back to me.
“They went to dinner and dancing together. She suggested the dancing. I think that’s pretty good, considering she’s only known him a couple of days.”
“How much longer will it take?”
I shook my head. “The way she’s acting, I don’t think it’s going to be too much longer.”
“Not good enough,” he glared at me, his eyes narrowing. “My depositors are demanding an accounting. Every day the money is not where it belongs makes them angrier.”
“I’m trying to—”
“I want you to feel the pressure I feel,” he shouted at me. “What do I need to do to make you move faster? Do I need to torch your business? Do I need to hurt one of your friends? Do I need to hurt you? I will do whatever I need to do to get the money back. Understand?”
“I hear you,” I said quietly.
Now that he’d threatened me, he smiled. “Good.” He turned away from me, watched the screen.
I assumed that meant he was through with me. I stood and returned the way I’d come in. Wilder was waiting for me outside, standing by the car. When he saw me, he got in, started the engine. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him, but I wanted to get home. Reluctantly, I opened the passenger door and got in.
We rode to Watergate in silence. He pulled in the entrance, stopped the car, looked at me, grinned. “End of the line.”
I felt lucky to be home. I opened the door and climbed out.
“Last guy I killed took two days to die,” he told me before I closed the door. He laughed hysterically, hit the accelerator. The car threw gravel on me as he pulled back out on Gulf of Mexico Drive. I turned and walked down the drive to my building.
As I walked, I tried to assess what had just happened. D’Onifrio had wanted to personally pressure me. That had to mean the pressure on him was getting really intense. Confirmation of what Raines had told me earlier in the day.
My watch said two-fifteen when I entered the condo. I closed and locked the door behind me, poured myself a glass of wine, took my second shower of the evening, got into bed, and tried to will myself to sleep. I tossed and turned, becoming more and more agitated until the shrill ring of the phone shattered the night’s quiet.
The bedside clock read three-fifty as I grabbed the receiver off the cradle. No phone call at this time of night is good news. “Hello.”
“Is this Mr. Matthew Seattle?” a male voice asked.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Mr. Seattle, this is Sarasota Metro Fire Department.”
Chapter 35
It felt like somebody had hit me with a truck.
“We’re calling to notify you that a fire is in progress at a property we believe you own on Palm near Coconut.”
Thirty minutes later, I turned the Saab off SR41 onto Palm. I went only a block on Palm before being stopped by police barricades. I slammed on the brakes, pulled to the curb, got out of the car. A policeman stopped me almost immediately.
“That’s my building that’s on fire.”
He nodded, let me continue on. Ahead, I saw what was left of the building illuminated in the eerie white light of halogen spotlights. There was a haze of smoke, the smell of wood burning in the air. I didn’t see any flames, but that was because there wasn’t much left to burn.
Most of the roof was gone. All of the windows and the front door were gone. Big black scorch marks ran up from the openings. The yard and the parking area were littered with charred remains—a sofa, a visitor’s chair, wallboard. Firemen walked around with hoses, squirting things that still smoldered. Exhaust fans blew a constant stream of smoke and noise from the building.
I stood on the curb and watched, feeling helpless and angry. D’Onifrio hadn’t needed to do this to make me feel the pressure.
A fireman in full gear came over, stood next to me. “Are you Mr. Seattle?” he shouted over the noise of the exhaust fans.
I nodded.
“I’m Captain Harris. Sorry about your place. We got here less than two minutes after the alarm was turned in. Flames were already shooting out the roof. Not much we can do when it’s that far along. It’s going to be a total loss, I’m afraid.”
I knew he was right.
“There’s a fireproof safe in the back left room,” I shouted, telling him where my office had been. “Is that safe okay?”
He shrugged. “If it’s fire rated, it should be. When things cool off, we’ll take a look. In the meantime, there’s a man who needs to talk to you.” He pointed to a group of men standing by one of the fire trucks. “See him? The guy with the windbreaker that says Sheriff’s Department. He’s the arson investigator.”
I nodded, headed over, and introduced myself.
“Jack Fines. Arson,” he said and handed me his card. “Let’s go over to my vehicle, get out of the noise. It’ll be easier to talk.”
I followed him over to a police cruiser. He got in the driver’s side, I got in the other side, pulling the door closed behind me. He was right; it did cut down the noise.
“Mr. Seattle, I don’t mean to alarm you,” he said, “but this fire was set. Do you know of anyone who might want to harm you?”
I shook my head, tried to look bewildered and buy a little time to think. I couldn’t tell him anything about D’Onifrio. That would only make matters worse. Saying I couldn’t think of anyone who had a grudge against me sounded fake.
“Think back. Has there been any trouble at work? At home?’
A terrible idea surfaced. One I should have rejected immediately. Instead, I put everything I had into selling it. “Actually, there has,” I said tentatively. “But I can’t believe he’d do anything like—”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, it’s really sort of a misunderstanding. I can’t believe it has anything to do with this.”
“It might. Tell me about it.”
I made him pull the story of the Wakeman/Nevitt suit out of me a detail at a time. Each time he got a nugget of information, he wrote it down in a small notebook. “You say you had this meeting with the negotiator just a couple of days ago,” he repeated, writing furiously. “What was her name, again?”
“Sue Ann Tansky. She’d be a good person to talk to. She can tell you how upset Nevitt was when we asked for financial documents.”
He finished writing, looked over at me. “Any other problems or people you can think of?”
I pretended to ponder that for a few moments. “No, I can’t think of anything else.”
“We’ll start looking into this. Is there a number where we can reach you if we have further questions?” I gave him one of my cards. He looked at it, tucked it in his notebook. “If you think of anything else, you’ve got my card.” He opened his door. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Seattle.”
“Thank you. I appreciate your effort to track down whoever did this.”
He gave me a final we’ll-get-’em nod and got out of the car. I did, too.
I stood on the curb and watched the firemen pull things out of the building and throw them on the lawn. It was still too soon to go back into the building, and watching didn’t seem very productive. I looked at my watch. Four-twenty. It had been a long night. It was probably going to be an even longer day.
I headed for my car. I needed to let all my clients know what had happened. The easiest way would be a fax alert. I could do that from my machine at the condo. As I walked, I conside
red headlines:
“Seattle’s Stock Picks So Hot, Building Burns.”
Or
“How Can You Be Sure Seattle Has The Hottest Recommendations?
Hey, Who Else Has Had A Building Burn?”
Or
“Seattle’s Stock Picks Are On Fire.
(Oops, The Building Just Went Up In Smoke.)”
When it came time to actually do it, however, I chickened out, used the more bland:
“Building Destroyed By Fire.
Won’t Stop Seattle Service.”
In the text, I told everyone to contact me at my cellular number and that we’d be back in touch as soon as we had a new location. I turned the fax program on send and went to the kitchen to get something to eat.
I made coffee, dumped Cheerios into a bowl. As I poured a glass of orange juice, my hand shook. I was used to getting a bad night’s sleep, not to getting no sleep. I sat, ate, tried to hold myself together.
At seven-thirty, I called Rosemary at home and broke the news to her.
“How horrible,” she said angrily. “What can I do to help?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know more after I talk to the insurance company. I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and dialed Shelby Simms, my agent, gave him the details. He had a plan of action.
“Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll have a portable office trailer brought to your location. Fully furnished—desks, phones, computers, fax. You’ll be back in business by noon. Let me get going on that. Once we get that set up, we’ll start on your claim. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds great, Shelby. Can you let Rosemary know when the unit will arrive? She’ll get things going on our end.”
He agreed. I called Rosemary back and filled her in on the plan while I had my third cup of coffee. Tired and wired.
As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. It was Tory. “Matt, I just saw your building on the morning—”
“Yeah, it was a pretty bad night.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“They don’t, but I do. It was D’Onifrio.”
Jay Giles Page 16
